Photo Credit: Flickr user ActionPixs (Maruko)
By Thomas Lansner, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs
Professor Thomas Lansner, author of the Kenya report in Countries at the Crossroads 2010, observes that Kenya is currently confronting an outright crisis of governance. He argues that the country's political elite needs to end zero-sum politics in order to resolve the situation before it boils over into a nation-threatening catastrophe.
Kenya’s crisis of governance today threatens not only its peoples’ security and livelihoods, but potentially its continued existence as a state. Like other countries artificially and often arbitrarily created by external powers, its citizens share a constructed identity. Loyalty to such an identity is neither intrinsic nor unbreakable. It must be earned by the legitimacy of ruling institutions. And a notional national identity is even more tenuous if a country’s resources are perceived to be captured and distributed in ways that effectively exclude large portions of the population on the basis of race, religion, language, or ethnicity.
Since achieving independence from Britain in 1963, Kenya’s leaders have intensified ethno-linguistic rivalries over control of scarce resources, particularly land. As I reported in Freedom House’s 2010 Countries at the Crossroads, “The country’s ethnic divisions have been reinforced by successive generations of politicians who have used patronage to build personal and party loyalties based on ethno-regionalism.”
The effects of ethnic and clan-based patronage politics include endemic corruption and pervasive impunity that undermine the legitimacy of governmental institutions by weakening their efficacy and flouting their fairness. In Kenya today, checks and balances that in democratic systems are meant to control the more venal and brutal tendencies of the powerful are almost entirely absent. The judiciary is mostly emasculated. Governmental watchdogs remain toothless even if they raise alarm. The executive is virtually unaccountable for high crimes as well as misdemeanors.
Some hope for positive change in Kenya rises from an often vibrant — if still imperiled — mass media, and a growing network of civil society organizations that transcend ethnic lines and are building citizen pressure for better governance. But these voices remain mostly ineffective at convincing powerholders to concede to their demands.
Is Kenya is en route to becoming a “failed state”? Lack of resources and capacities inhibit development even in countries with the best-intentioned administrations. If a country that does not or cannot provide security and justice and opportunities for its peoples is defined as failing, then Kenya would join a bevy of other nations, not all of them in the “developing” world, that should be so labeled. Honest efforts by accountable leaders can win citizen trust on which progress, even if gradual, and “nationhood” is built. Yet political infighting in Nairobi is so severe that the coalition cabinet has not even met since early February.
Kenya’s potentially catastrophic failure would be far broader than public dismay at poor performance: it would be active rejection by its citizens of the possibility that the state as constituted will ever serve all its peoples with a reasonable degree of fairness and competency. Absent this faith, other loyalties might prevail, and formally fracture the country among ethno-linguistic groupings that functioned as the precolonial loci of power.
This remains a worst-case scenario, but it is imaginable if Kenya’s leadership across political parties and ethnicities continue to place personal and group privilege ahead of justice. Deeply flawed December 2007 elections, contested largely along ethnic lines, evoked bloody confrontations—often promoted by various politicians—in which at least 1,100 people were killed. There are credible reports that ethnic militias that then nearly launched a civil war while battling mainly with spears, machetes, and bows and arrows are now stockpiling automatic weapons.
As the Countries at the Crossroads Kenya report urges, international pressure and mediation are desperately needed to help properly empower the country’s democratic institutions, and to ensure acceptable elections in 2012. Maintaining politics as a zero-sum competition for ethnic-based spoils, rather than an arena for national compromise, could drive Kenya to a conflagration it will be lucky as a nation to survive, and one that many of its citizens surely will not. Parliament's approval on April 1 of a draft constitution that will now go to a national referendum is an encouraging sign. But Kenya's recent history gives scant hope that the country's leaders will honor its highest laws, or their own most solemn promises.
